A great deal of attention has been focused in recent years upon the reading abilities of children. While a variety of socio-economic and linguistic theories have been advanced, the attention devoted to the mechanics of learning to read has been inadequate to develop a system understandable by children with reading disabilities. A suprisingly common problem with children learning to read is dyslexia. The dyslexic child does not understand the orientation or directionality of a letter, so that the letter d is confused with the letter b. Similarly, an entire word is sometimes reversed in orientation, so that "on" is confused with "no". While the present invention is not limited to teaching reading to dyslexic children, it has been found that difficulties with orientation and directionality of words are common in learning to read. Related to this is a failure to recognize letters, which is known in the trade as a problem of graphic symbol differentiation. Also, many readers fail to perceive the length of a word or the number of letters forming it, which leads to a misinterpretation of the word by the omission of a part of it. Also, it is commonplace for a reader with a learning or reading disability to transpose the sequential arrangement of the letters in a word.
The association of sounds with letters within the word itself is greatly facilitated by using pictorial symbols within the orthography. Sound association is a normal process in learning to read, but traditional reading techniques do not provide for facilitating the association of sounds of letters within words. The failure to associate sounds adequately is related to the problem of insufficient recall of words from a vocabulary, word analysis, and a narrow sight vocabulary. Many orthographics have been developed over the years, but often they substitute different letters than the ones actually appearing in the word to facilitate pronunciation and recall. However, these orthographics do not resolve the directionality and sequence problems, and leave the student to learn the word in the form actually printed in texts outside the orthography. Also, existing orthographies do not include the clues to sounds immediately associated with the letters to be sounded, but require recall of the clues from the letters.